Olivier Urman

Olivier Urman's work is constructed through a methodical confrontation with time, matter, and the appearance of things.

For more than twenty-five years, his work has unfolded as a conceptual resistance to what he calls “the end of things,” not out of nostalgia, but as an attempt to uncover the processes by which the world is transformed into scenery, memory, residue. According to him, “everything we see belongs to the past”: the world is nothing but a backdrop in perpetual consumption.

Sculptures, installations, paintings, theoretical protocols, and performative gestures are all part of the same movement: shifting representation to reach what, in objects and images, escapes the wear and tear of time.

His works do not seek to produce new forms, but to neutralize the tyranny of plasticity. By removing, masking, crushing, or reconfiguring appearances, Olivier Urman challenges the distinction between subject and backdrop, between matter and memory, between presence and disappearance.

With Surpressions, created from dust from objects reduced to their own material, Urman achieves a unique point of equilibrium: the work no longer represents the object, it is its reorganized material trace, on the exact scale of its absence.

This radical shift affirms a painting without illusion, where matter becomes active memory and where the setting turns against itself. In this sense, Olivier Urman's work does not offer an answer to the end of things, but a strategy of resistance: to make art an unalterable mental space, where time is no longer endured but recomposed.